03.13.98

I Believe in Desktop Patterns

Posted in Apple, Life, Media, People at 6 pm

Friday morning/Afternoon, and I’ve finally gotten caught up on my e-mail, somewhat. At least it’s down to under a screen full in my general in-box. My Nick Cave stuff is still pretty heavy though.

It’s been nice expect for the construction work outside. I’m planning on spending the day with Amy, trying to relax. Yesterday was pretty busy, so when I got home, I debriefed Amy on it for nearly an hour straight. I’m not usually talkative, but I just wanted to get it all out of my system. I’m glad she’s so patient with me.

On my “I Believe” pages for Apple I added a few desktop patterns for people without web pages. They’re pretty garish as desktop patterns go, but some people like them. <http://www.zephyr.net/rosso/believe/>

<^>

03.12.98

She's a Peach

Posted in Career, Life, Meta, People, Web at 7 pm

Toady I’m doing part of a teacher workshop put on by OMSI. These are teachers with little or no experience with web development, and I’ll be giving them the basics. I’ll be trying to show them a way of critiquing sites so they can understand the difference between good and bad design. I’ve only got half and hour, so we’ll see how it goes.

Amy and I had a great night last night. Details unavailable. 🙂 “She’s a Peach…”

I got caught up on my e-mail back to about late Monday. I’ve still got stuff back to early last week… 🙁

I finally got a counter on this page. It will be interesting to see how many I’m getting. As well, I implemented that new error page for OMSI. It’s working really well from what I can see. The only problem is that if it works well, then no one will know it’s there… :p

<()>

03.11.98

The Art of Human Computer Interface Design

Posted in Apple, Meta, Tech, Web at 1 pm

Home and finally done for the day. The meeting for the Webmaster’s group was a lot of fun. But I think I may have been a bit too enthusiastic. I started going off about virtually every aspect of developing the OMSI web site from the Server Side Includes to the CGIs that I’ve worked up. I asked a couple of times if the other people there minded me just digging into the aspects of these web pages. They encouraged me to keep going, but they may have just been being nice.

Amy says she pointed a link to my journal in her journal at < <http://www.spiritone.com/~giovanni/> >. Tit-for-tat… 🙂

Oh, books I’ve been reading: The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design which is basically a manifesto by Apple circa 1990. Also Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, which is an O’Reiley book, plus all the usual web journals:

<http://www.webreference.com/>

<http://www.webreview.com/>

<http://www.macosrumors.com/>

<http://www.webmonkey.com/>

and I’d like to read <http://www.builder.com/> from c|net, but I can’t stand how slow their web pages render. Waaaaay too many tables. (Can you see I’m getting a lot of use out of this auto URL linking?)

I wonder if/when my family will find this journal.

<%>

03.10.98

Fourteen Days

Posted in Life, Web at 6 pm

Gave Blood today. I really think this is important for people who can to do it. Blood that is donated only lasts for 14 days. This really surprised me. I didn’t know it was that short.

Now I’m off to a health insurance meeting. 5:00 to 7:00 and then a local web masters group at 7:00 downtown. On the run today…

<->

Great Information Sites

Posted in Design, People, Web at 1 pm

Long day. Attended Amy’s PCOS Support meeting tonight. It had some good information, but I got trapped in the kitchen by a guy going off about his glory days. He seemed nice, but his stories were frightening. It’s a difficult situation to try and get out of.

Saw a great site today: <http://www.cool404.com/> has cool ‘Page Not Found’ pages. Some of them aren’t that great but there were a few pages with some innovative things on them. I worked on OMSI’s error page because of it: <http://www.omsi.edu/qqqqq> will bring it up.

Some other Web design pages I want to check out at some point are: <http://goldray.com/webdesign/design_resources.htm> and <http://goldray.com/webdesign/course-content.htm> but I’ll wait until I get back into work for the T1 access.

I’m so tired. I’ve got to finish reading a few digests, then I’m off to bed.

<+>

Patterning and Journaling

Posted in Life, Meta at 10 am

To do today: Drop off the bills, drop off the rent, drop off the budget projection, drop off Riven.

Oh and try to catch up on my e-mail. It’s been seriously backlogged.

Just in case anyone cares, this journal has been modeled on <http://www.scripting.com/> and a few other journals I’ve seen. I still want to do something with that side bar color.

<=>

03.09.98

Water Works

Posted in Career, Media, Web at 3 pm

Monday morning and I’m back into the fray. Had a department meeting with Marilyn and Stacey that lasted quite a while.

I took the WaterWorks web site on OMSI’s pages and cleaned it up a bit, added a couple of needed pages and links and cleaned up the file structure. It’s an interesting resources though the graphics area really lacking: <http://www.omsi.edu/sln/ww/>

Feeling really busy and yet little to show for it. I guess I’m still trying to get a few pieces into place so that the work I’ve been going can be put out in the open. It’s the waiting that’s the hardest part – Tom Petty

I took one of Amy’s O-+> CD’s to work. The Hits 2.

Good stuff.

<%>

03.08.98

Server Side Includes Library

Posted in Web at 12 pm

This page has good list of the environment variables that are available to CGIs: <http://www.ppc.edu/~fred/course308/cgi.html> and I’ll be adding it to my XSSI Library later today.
<http://www.ordersomewherechaos.com/rosso/xssi/>

XSSI’s can be very powerful if you have access to them. But I hadn’t fund any good documentation about them, so I started my own library. I haven’t added anything lately, because I haven’t been working with Server Side Includes. I should list the site at Yahoo and on the ADV-HTML list.

<->

Regex for Links, The Return

Posted in Meta, Tech at 12 pm

Looks like it finally http://works like I want it to. Simone is racing around the apartment like a mad cat. Here’s the regex I finally worked out:

s/((http|ftp):S*)/<A HREF="1">1</A>/g

If any one has any improvements on it, let me know. hmmm. I should add a mailto in to that alternation area like so:

s/((http|ftp|mailto):S*)/<A HREF="1">1</A>/g

now I can do inline e-mails as well. rosso (with an ‘at’ sign) microsuck.com is an alternate address I have. That’s cool. Well it’s only 11:00 (yes the time/date stamp is off) and I already feel like I got something done today. Oh, and I cleared out some of the older entries that were just testings things. Looks like I’ve got to get that automatic archiving system in place soon.

<@>

Sunday Through Thursday

Posted in Career, Media, Web at 11 am

Dealing with HTML really makes regex a lot of fun. It seems as though the pattern I set up has just gone all over the place. I’ve had to comment it out in order to get perl to run the script at all. Well it looks like it runs now. But I still want the regex to work.

Amy and I didn’t get to watch Shine because the tape was messed up. Whenever the tape was playing normally, the screen went to its ‘this-image-is-so-messed-up I’m-just-going-to-show-a-blue-screen’ screen, but you could see the video when you had the tape moving at fast-forward or in reverse. I guess I’ll take them back to Hollywood Video today.

I work on a Sunday through Thursday schedule by my own choosing. So I’m headed into work this morning.

<->